Citizen Khan review – very traditional British sitcom

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/oct/31/citizen-khan-review-british-sitcom

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Ah, the return of Citizen Khan (BBC1). To the schedules, and from Pakistan. The Khan family has just landed, with plenty of excess baggage, including Mrs Kahn’s mother, whose heavy trunk lands on Mr Kahn’s foot. But then the lady under the headscarf turns out not to be the mother-in-law – she is someone else altogether, a stranger. So where is Naani? Still on the plane! Which is just about to leave for Somalia! (What is that flight, Karachi to Mogadishu with a 15-minute stopover in Birmingham?)

So Mr Kahn goes off, doing his comedy run, and because the plane has already left for Mogadishu, he falls out the end of the jet bridge. (That’s what the mechanical lamprey that attaches itself to a plane’s door, through which you board, is called. I looked it up.) There is further luggage-based humour, before Naani shows up by the carousel – she was in the toilet and Accessorize (in baggage reclaim? Really?). They go home to decide which cultural approach to adopt over Naani’s care. Pakistani style, and keep her with them, the family together; or the British way, and dump her in a home until Christmas?

There’ll be the usual moans, and counter-moans. It’s full of lazy cliches and stereotyping? Nonsense, it’s warm and affable, a community looking in the mirror and laughing at itself, and if you can’t do that, then God help us all. Looking at myself in the mirror, I notice I’m perhaps not best placed to judge the cliches, though I tend to sympathise with the humour loss.

I am in position to say something about it as comedy, however. It’s very traditional British sitcom, as cutting edge as a wooden spoon, with a chump of a central character – more of a central caricature – walking funny, dropping things, starting to say something then realising he shouldn’t be saying it. And the laughs coming from misunderstandings, differences (generational, as well as cultural), luggage. And not knowing who it is under a headscarf.

I say laughs, but I’m not doing a lot of that to be honest (I might be doing more if it were the 1970s). It doesn’t matter though: it comes with its own laughter, of course.